The Dragon Queen (Lamb & Castle Book 3)

by J M Sanford

  Finished with attending to the minor cuts and bruises of her companions, Meg went walking around the deck of the stranded skyship, waving her arms about in a way that Amelia was sure she would have been chastised for. “Amelia, be a dear and conjure a light for me.”

  Amelia did so. It was one of the earliest spells she'd learned, and she was secretly proud of the perfect bright spheres of light she could conjure. But this one sagged like a fried egg in a pan, sinking lower and lower, dispersing in the light fall of snow before it hit the ground.

  “Well that won't do at all, will it?” said Meg.

  “The magic here is desperately thin,” said Percival, sounding more as if the air was uncomfortably thin. “It's hardly fair to blame Amelia for that.”

  Meg ignored him. There was a bright determination in her eyes, an answer to a challenge. She stretched up on tiptoes, and with the tip of her finger inscribed a pencil-thin line of fire in the air, from the highest point she could reach, right down to the deck. The line of fire shivered in the wind, dispersing into sheets of light that flared and then dimmed. Meg watched shrewdly, dragons and plots temporarily forgotten. “Hmm. So what do you make of that then, Perce?”

  “Planes of magic, paper thin,” he said, “rather than an even dispersal of power. I could have told you that much from the outset.”

  Bryn nodded. “Sharvesh feels it too. I truly believe she can adapt and sail such a sky, given time for learning.”

  “This is not an apt time for learning,” said Greyfell. “And we’d be fools to place our faith in magic when it’s evidently scarce.”

  “Quiet, you,” growled Meg, raising a bejewelled hand, although she didn’t actually resort to her silencing spell. Amelia realised with a sickening horror that even the threat of it might be empty, here in this world of broken magic, and she could read the same realisation on her mother’s face. As much as Meg might suspect Greyfell of betraying them, she was scarcely in a position to confront him over it, if witches were all but powerless in this new world. Meg confirmed those fears soon enough, whispering in Amelia’s ear: “All right: no more magic until I say it’s safe.”

  4: RUINS

  Under the circumstances, Meg and Amelia would have little choice but to go along with the majority, which rankled Meg far more than it did Amelia. Everyone had disembarked from the listing skyship, and stood in a close knot around Amelia and her caged fire sprite. Even dimmed and shuddering, the poor creature was the only source of light and warmth in this barren landscape where the fog stretched out towards hazy horizons. Once certain that everyone had cleared to a safe distance, Sharvesh began to fold up on herself, lines softening and blurring, boggling the eye and the brain as the skyship folded down smaller and smaller, into a box no bigger than a tea chest. Captain Bryn then crouched shivering as he desperately unfolded, refolded, and unfolded the box like a paper toy a child might use to tell fortunes, in search of a compartment with useful winter supplies.

  “Where to, then?” asked Harold. After some debate, they’d agreed that they would proceed from their landing site on foot, saving the skyship’s energy until they might have nothing else to rely on, but the way forward was far from clear, and Percival in particular was reluctant to move at all. Snow gathered thick on his armour and he didn’t even move to dislodge it.

  “That way,” said Meg decisively, indicating a jumble of dark rock, a shadowy hill standing high and stark above the fog. Lucky the skyship hadn’t come straight down, or that bleak hill would have been the only monument to their deaths.

  “I agree,” said Greyfell.

  “No one asked your opinion, dear,” said Meg.

  “Aha!” Bryn’s triumphant cry rang out in the empty landscape, and he held aloft a brace of storm lanterns that he’d pulled from the depth of some hidden compartment in the wooden box. Setting them aside, he refolded the puzzle that was Sharvesh again and again, noticeably slower each time, as her power waned and Bryn grew weary. Just as Meg stepped forth to stop him, he waved her impatiently away, running to join the group himself, and Sharvesh flourished slowly but majestically back to her usual shape and size. “Apologies, apologies, sirs and ladies!” said Bryn. “I will require some assistance in equipping our party.”

  Everyone went back aboard, Amelia and Bessie each armed with one of the lanterns, to find that while the skyship might look like her old self, her configuration had changed dramatically. Gone were the large galley and the luxurious cabins. All was storage space, now, as Bryn had instructed Sharvesh to make all her cargo accessible. To this end, a dozen doors and hatches opened onto cramped compartments, each no bigger than a wardrobe. Each compartment was full of tea, linens, books, and doors to more. But there was no time to marvel at the treasures she’d been hiding – all around them the dark red timbers creaked and cracked under great strain. “We must be quick,” Bryn warned, “she is carrying all her weight at once, this way.” And then he vanished into the uncountably many compartments, as comfortable in the dark as a rabbit is in his warren. The others squeezed through behind him. In contrast to the world outside, the new labyrinth Sharvesh had made of her interior was stifling, uncomfortably warm with breath.

  Sharvesh – marvellously clever creature that she was – had managed to place most of the contents of the cabins close at hand, although Percival’s books, Greyfell’s weapons, and Meg’s knitting were all jumbled together. Amelia retrieved her bag and her spell book, mindful to thank the skyship out loud for her thoughtfulness. Next they went in search of winter gear. As Amelia paused to try and get her bearings, Meg climbed through a hatch behind her, glancing over her shoulder to be sure they were alone.

  “Whether I’m right or wrong about the Black Queen,” – and this was as close as Meg ever got to admitting any possible error in her thinking – “it wouldn’t surprise me at all if we ran into Archalthus and his men,” she said.

  “Don’t say his name!” Amelia whispered. The Dragon Prince’s name had a magic power of its own, capable of summoning the beast in all his fire and fury.

  “Oh, don’t worry about that,” said Meg flippantly. “I’ll keep count this time. No more than twice. Anyway. We must keep the crown safe, and not just from the prince. If the Black Side were the ones to bring us here… Well, even if they weren’t, it’s best we keep hold of the crown for now. I’ll confess I can’t get my bearings. I thought that Bessie seemed a nice enough girl, but we mustn’t forget who and what she is.”

  Amelia had to agree with that. Bessie might not have brought them to this strange new world, but the assassin-in-training wouldn’t pass up an opportunity to turn events to her advantage. Bessie might know how to put on a friendly show, with games and stories, but how long did it take for a person’s true colours to start bleeding through whatever mask they chose to wear? Amelia shuddered. It hadn’t taken long for the handsome prince to show himself up as a very bad-tempered dragon. And if she must remember that Bessie was in fact the Black Queen, then she’d better remember too that she was the White Queen. Taking the crown from her bag, she strapped it once more to her leg, hidden under her skirts.

  Soon the stranded travellers gathered close to the listing skyship’s side, not much more sheltered there than in the open air. At least they’d found some winter coats, and in particular Amelia had been glad to find her flying gloves in one compartment, although she hadn't dared ride a broom since that fateful day when Ilgrevnia had vanished. Unable to rely on her magic for defence, she put on the armour of the White Queen, which she felt or imagined to be much heavier than before. Meg was trying to convince Sir Percival to remove the burden of his own armour and eat some of the spicy Argean trail meat they had, but to no avail. Even swaying wearily, even with Meg brandishing the stiff strips of dried beef at him almost angrily, the knight could still be stubborn on that subject.

  “Here, Miss Amelia,” said Bryn, draping a coat of glossy dark fur over her shoulders, weighing her down further. “When the sun rises, dark colours will catch the w
armth.”

  Amelia thought he was being unrealistically hopeful, but thanked him anyway. He’d been so kind to her, and she hadn’t meant to drag him into this. She glanced across at Harold and couldn’t help but admire the solid, broad-shouldered figure he cut in his own fur cloak, his armour with its white lamb insignia bright in the light of the lantern he held. His other hand was on the hilt of his sword and the wind was whipping through his thick brown hair, making him look less a small-town butcher’s boy and more a magnificent adventurer. Part of her was selfishly glad to have accidentally dragged him along on this journey. She was defenceless without magic. She’d found the White Queen’s sword amongst their things, but with its enchantment gone she could barely lift it, let alone wield it. She left it in Sharvesh.

  Bessie, pinning her hair back out of the way, came over. “This isn’t you, is it?” she asked quietly. “You didn’t do something with that thing the griffin gave you?”

  “What ‘thing’?” said Amelia, doing her best to strike some kind of middle ground between puzzled and indignant.

  “That snow globe.”

  “No! I got rid of that ages ago, like you told me to.”

  “What, in Ilgrevnia, or…”

  “After that,” said Amelia, desperately trying to think when Bessie might have seen the snow globe last. She shrugged. “Threw it in a river somewhere, I seem to remember. Who needs it?”

  Bessie regarded her with narrowed eyes, uncertain. “I think we might.”

  “Miss Castle! Here!” Master Greyfell barked, and Bessie scurried to heel. A couple of games of chess notwithstanding, Black Queen and White Queen were never meant to have been friends. Quaking with nerves, Amelia hurried to join her own trusted companions.

  “Oh!” Meg’s hand flew to her mouth, and her eyes went round as saucers behind her spectacles. “The golem! We left him…” In the chaos of the storm and the near-crash, nobody had thought to check on the prisoner. Meg turned to Bryn, and the puzzle box that Sharvesh had since made of herself. It was the size of a tea caddy. Nothing bigger than a mouse could possibly be inside.

  Bryn looked crestfallen. “I’m afraid it will be much too late to save him.”

  Amelia bit her lip. “But Sharvesh wouldn’t… Surely not on purpose. I mean she’d know, wouldn’t she?” She’d seen the stone gentleman chained in the hold, knew how little chance of escape he’d have had as the walls began to move and close in. His fate was too horrible to imagine.

  “All the jewellery, the tea, the fancy furniture. They don’t get crushed, do they?” Bessie pointed out. “And he was made of stone, so, maybe…”

  It was the only hope the prisoner had, and much too late to do anything about it either way, but a heaviness descended on the stranded travellers as they set off towards the ruins. For all that the stone gentleman was their enemy, none of them would have chosen to kill him in such an awful manner, while he was bound and defenceless.

  As they walked, heads bowed against the wind, the level ground upon which Sharvesh had managed to make her landing gave way to a blanket of snow hummocked and invitingly soft to the eye, but hiding loose rocks and hard edges. The dark hill they’d set their sights on turned out to be a ruin, and the treacherous rocks beneath the snow were the scattered outskirts of it. The purple sky showed through the open holes of what had once been windows peppering the higher reaches of the ruins. If uninhabited, its broken roofs might still provide shelter from the wind and snow; somewhere they could strike a spark and a campfire might catch. But a journey that would have been less than an inch on almost any map felt like a long night’s trek. Made clumsy by the cold despite their furs, they twisted their ankles, scraped their shins and bruised their pride more than once.

  Master Greyfell stopped. “By God, it was a Flying City,” he murmured, barely audible above the howling wind. Then he struck off from the group. Bessie ran after him, all but disappearing from view in the pale grey coat she’d borrowed.

  Fragmented sections of dark walls towered above the travellers, the bitter wind pouring through empty windows. Beyond the mass of the ruins lay the Orb, quiet and dark, but Greyfell and Bessie barely seemed to see it as they headed instead for an island of standing rock in the snow. There, the moonlight lay unbroken along a flat length of shining smooth rock, the monolith of a Flying City’s Keystone – or the upper portion of it – lying amongst the ruins. “Ilgrevnia!” Greyfell shouted. Then, singling out Meg from the group, “So much for her mysterious vanishment!”

  Meg grumbled something under her breath, but Greyfell was right of course: the ruined city was of that grey granite so uncharacteristic of a Flying City, its walls scorched, quenched and fractured, its chambers recently abandoned.

  Bessie, overtaking her teacher, went scrambling up a steep slope of rubble and broken floorboards, picking her way through a sparkling mess of broken glass. “Miss Spinner, over here! You must see this!”

  All was silver under the round eye of the moon, but the shadows were as black as black velvet, and as Meg climbed she was several times lost from view. Amelia tracked her progress anxiously, fearing that at any moment she might be dragged off into the night by some horrible creature native to this new world. Harold was keeping close to Amelia, watchful and ready for a fight. Somewhere in the ruins, a scatter of stones fell, making them both jump. But there was nobody there.

  “It's the Archmage's workshop,” Bessie’s disembodied voice drifted on the wind. “We may be able to salvage useful supplies.”

  “Not a bad idea,” said Meg. “Come on, Amelia!” she called.

  Amelia looked up: even by moonlight, she could recognise features of Archmage Morel’s workshop, left surprisingly untouched in the devastation all around it. One wall was gone entirely, but what remained of the roof seemed sound enough for now. She handed her caged fire sprite to Harold. “Stay here,” she told him, “in case the whole thing falls in on us and we need someone to dig us out. I won’t go far,” she promised, and began to climb up after the other two.

  The fires that had scorched and cracked the bricks of other buildings had failed to touch here, although dark stains – blood or ink, Amelia didn’t examine them too closely – ran down the tilted floor. The high arched windows had shattered explosively, broken stone and shards of glass littering the broad terrace. The stand that had once held the Orb of Helemneum had torn and bent like wet sticks, the well below it empty and dark. The marble dissecting table lay broken in pieces, drifts of snow blown in and beginning to pile up about them. Last time Amelia had been here, she’d seen two of the stone gentlemen waiting, silently sleeping, if it could be said they slept at all. They must be gone now, shattered like any other stone that had once belonged to the City of Ilgrevnia. It was an awful waste of some of the finest carving Amelia had ever seen, but it was an awful relief, too. By her count, that made three of the stone gentlemen gone for good. Five, if she could believe what Bessie had said about two of them having fallen from the edge of another Flying City, five thousand feet up. They were robust, she knew, but not that robust.

  Amelia moved slow as a snail across the broken and splintered floorboards, which were tilted uncomfortably like the deck of a grounded skyship, and coated with a glassy film of ice. She feared for her safety. She feared stumbling across a dead body. All the jars and bottles that had once lined the shelves had shattered in the fall, so that ice and scattered gems of glass crunched alike under her sturdy boots as she joined Meg and Bessie, who had wasted no time in rifling through boxes and drawers for what last remnants they might find. Amelia didn’t know what they thought they could salvage, but it took Bessie no time at all to find things worth pocketing. Meg was more discerning, but slipped something hastily into her bag with an oddly furtive look. Amelia didn’t see what it was, and had more sense than to ask about it in front of Bessie. She’d find out later.

  Bessie stopped filling her pockets and looked around the ruined room again. She gazed thoughtfully at where the Orb had stood, then climbe
d out onto the perilous remains of the terrace outside, which teetered half-ruined over a long drop into black shadow. It was easy to trace the path of the Orb, which had rolled to a halt some distance from the bulk of the ruins, sitting low in a hollow in the ground.

  “Miss Spinner!” she called. “That’s the Orb from the Archmage’s workshop. I think it must have brought us here, somehow. But… it’s not glowing.” She turned to Amelia, who cringed from an anticipated accusation, but all Bessie said was: “It did glow before, didn’t it? When we were here with the griffin? When…” she had the decency to look guilty then, and not to finish what she’d been about to say. When she and the black griffin had sabotaged the Orb. “Do you think it’s broken?”

  Amelia stood with her mouth open, wishing that something useful would come out of it. She didn’t know; couldn’t remember; wished she paid more attention to things. The purplish metal of the bindings – unmistakeably amaranthine in daylight, dull here – looked like they could possibly be fixed by somebody who knew what they were doing, but as for the Orb itself… Its glass skin looked glossy and whole despite its fall, but the facets within looked fractured and dead. She thought of the snow globe in her pocket. In a way, this made them even: Bessie had broken the great Orb, and she had broken the little snow globe.

  “Right. Assume for now that it doesn’t work,” said Meg to Amelia. “Keep looking for things we can use.”

  “We should watch out for the Archmage,” Bessie warned them. “And other servants of the prince. I don’t think they can be far away.”

  “I’ll bear that in mind,” said Meg, brusquely. “Amelia,” she whispered, “see if you can find yourself a good knife or two. Mages often keep them for rituals and the like.”

  Amelia gave a good show of jumping to the task. In reality, though, she was edging out of the unnatural cave of the destroyed workshop, finding unusual bits and pieces of debris here and there but hardly looking at what she picked up, and discarding most of it again without any more thought. Her attention was on the task of separating herself inch by inch from her companions until she disappeared into the velvet black shadows of a cluster of broken towers. Choosing a dark nook, she took out the snow globe again. She whispered the spell in the tone of a prayer, but to no avail.